Preparing students and families to thrive in the gene age

Whole genome shotgun, Eric Lander

The whole genome shotgun worked fine on a bacterial genome like influenza because there are no repeats in the genome, or almost no repeats in the genome, and so it's very easy to overlap the consecutive pieces. It's much more problematic to make a perfect finished sequence of something like a human or a mouse, using a whole genome shotgun, because you have some very long, very perfect repeat sequences and you can't get them just right. It'll work fine for getting you much of the genome, even most of the genome, but if you want to get it perfect you're going to have to look on a more local basis to be sure that you've got the sequence assembled correctly.